1. Technical Field
This invention generally relates to a speaker predicting apparatus and a speaker predicting method.
2. Related Art
In recent years, with higher speed and higher capacity of the communications line, the importance of teleconferencing system has been increasingly focused on. In a teleconferencing system, a conference or meeting can be held by connecting multiple sites located remotely to send and receive image signals and sound signals. Teleconferencing systems are favorable from a financial standpoint, because conference participants do not have to move between the remote sites. Also, as compared to a simple voice communication, the teleconferencing systems serve many uses as a communication tool, because the amount of information that can be sent and received is greatly increased.
Conventionally, in order to specify the speaker in one of the conference rooms and selectively send the images and sounds of the speaker, an operator is needed for selectively changing cameras and a camera direction to capture the images and selectively changing microphones to collect the sounds. In a similar manner, when there are multiple participants in another conference room, another operator is also needed for a similar operation in another conference room.
Under the circumstances, there has been proposed a teleconferencing system, by which it is possible to identify the speaker on the basis of the information on the image being captured. In this technique, an image of a face of a participant is extracted and a movement of lips thereof is captured in the image of the face, so as to detect a pre-action before speaking. Accordingly, the participant who is going to speak is identified as a speaker.
However, in the a fore-described technique, the pre-action before speaking is detected. It is difficult to detect the speech or remarks before the speaker actually starts speaking.